Naïveté abounded among rich-world leaders in the 1990s.
Free market capitalism and representative democracy seemed ascendant. Free-flowing information online seemed to inspire people to overthrow repressive governments.
In March 2000, then President Bill Clinton famously dismissed a new effort from the Chinese Communist Party to censor the internet: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Likewise, German and other European leaders argued that doing business with Russian and Chinese companies would make them freer. Looking back, this all looks plainly wrong.
That’s a theme from the 2024 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
More free-flowing information does not necessarily mean more truth. Technologies have helped democratic movements no more than they’ve helped authoritarian ones, and turns out those Russian oil providers and Chinese electronic vehicle firms were at least in part government actors, so their motivations weren’t only aligned with a Western capitalistic view.
Today, at least half of all humans now live within states considered autocratic. The world has gotten less democratic in recent years, a backward trend that in the early 1990s seemed impossible. Applebaum’s book is a breezy and thoughtful overview of this emerging bloc she calls “Autocracy Inc.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Autocracy Inc.
